Since population was increasing in Great Britain at the same time that landowners were enclosing common village lands, people from the countryside flocked to the towns and the new factories to get work. Male and female children earned about the same amount, a wage gap based on gender began to appear at age 16. The average wage for women working in factories in 1833 was about seven shillings per week. It  was common for teenage boys working in factories to earn more money than their mothers. This resulted in a very high unemployment rate for workers in the first phases of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the unemployed or underemployed were skilled workers, such as hand weavers, whose talents and experience became useless because they could not compete with the efficiency of the new textile machines.